On being presented with a blank canvas
Therapists will often try and persuade you that anxiety is just excitement without enough breathing. I do not entirely buy into this, and I have tried it. But there is a moment of tension where fizzing, tingling, thrilling, anticipation meets fear, and they are all rather muddled and mixed and it is just like that moment where the rollercoaster reaches the top and you don’t know if you want it to stop or to go or to just get off.
I am not overstating it when I say that this is how I feel when taking over a new piece of ground. Whirling with potential and possibilities and Pinterest. And utterly, utterly paralysed by the enormity of the task. I do wonder if I shouldn’t go and garden in someone else’s garden and just be told what to do, because sometimes the responsibility of decision-making weighs just too heavy. I am invested in beauty, I am obsessed with the creation of beautiful spaces, I cannot settle for ordinary (God knows, life would be so much more peaceful if I could), but very often I wonder if I am up to the task. Or capable of achieving my own expectations anyway.
It does not help that I have spent the last few years immersed in the writings and the work of Vita Sackville-West, and the last few months in William Morris. Images of Arts and Crafts gardens are like catnip to me when it comes to conjuring up garden designs in my mind’s eye – I never struggle with this bit. It is the actual laying out, pegging of beds and placing of topiary, and digging of holes and setting down of paths where I start to feel a bit in need of a sit down.
This is commitment.
[An aside: How did I not know that there was a ‘pre-garden’ to Sissinghurst? A lovely article here, with photography by Claire Coulson. A lot of ideas in here…]
The key to success at this stage is to be really clear about the potential and the limitations. Not just of the garden and the space, that’s the easy bit, but of the self. Time, effort, physical labour. Compost space. Where to store the mower and the tools. I am confident in trimming square topiary (hedges and cubes) but a rank amateur at rounds and circles. I think anxiety about taking this step into the liminal space between ambition and apprehension is responsible for more suburban lawns than Homebase adverts. Grass is easy. Grass is safe.
Fortune favours the brave though. These are the questions I am asking myself.
what is this space for? What do you want?
The practical and the psychological. Firstly, the side bit of garden, which are currently calling ‘The South Lawn’, has to include something which screens the cottage and the garden off from the main Taunton to Honiton road. Pleached limes maybe, or crab apples. Who doesn’t love a pleached Malus ‘Evereste’? But maybe they just terribly cliched now. Something screening anyway. Double points if it also keeps the dogs in. I would just put willow panels up but I do also want passing villagers to at least glimpse the beauty within. I am not above a flirtation, and this is my shop front after all. I want my garden to turn heads.
But the most incredible thing about gardens is there is a beauty for every taste. Indeed, I already sense that the neighbours on either side are not going to fully appreciate my aesthetic, but for very different reasons. There are those who crave the clean and the minimal (I had to research a picture for this; it is not my natural milieu. However, on being reminded of it, I remember how powerful the effect of the restricted grass-based palette and the strong lines in the inner courtyard at Hauser & Wirth in Bruton.)
At the other end of the glorious spectrum of horticultural loveliness is the wild. I keep coming back to these photos of Rolf’s Farm by Jeska Hearne (who just happened to be the stylist on my book, Grow & Gather).
I have finally found a School of Life video that changed my life many years ago, but I then lost. Alain de Botton, so wise on so many matters of the heart and the mind, talks of how we seek out things in our homes and gardens that we feel we lack in the wider world. Either softness or status. Minimalism or comfort, our choices reflect something we need to balance out the harshness of our modern, frantic, lives. What do you want? Romance? Zen-like calm? Screw-you, patriarchy-smashing crazy wildness? A refuge from family life? Just knowing how this Theory of Compensation works will change how you look at your own home and garden, and how you look at other people’s forever. I guarantee it.
I mean, I get that you might also need a washing line. But even a washing line can be beautiful. My mother has a brabantia fold out thing and its utilitarian elegance makes her day. I have a piece of rope between two cherry trees. Neither is wrong. Each to their own.
2. what is there already? What do you have?
For many of us, this is the easiest of questions. I have grass, long neglected, and a hedge, ditto. My husband believes unmown grass is an indication of sluttishness and I barely had the keys in my hand before he had the strimmer and the mower out. The best that I can say is that we now have a blank canvas and he has left me a lot of piles of grass to rake up. Yes, we are working on it.
If you are taking over a plantsperson’s garden, you have, of course, basically won the lottery. That is why so many people say you should leave a garden a year before you make radical changes. You might never know if the custodian before you was a galanthophile, and that boring scrubby bit of land that you are so desperate to put the new shed on is actually chock full of a rare snowdrop collection. No, I have never been that lucky either.
If you have greenhouses or glasshouses, consider it a rollover win.
If you are in a new build, be careful about what you have below the soil too.
Once you have done a walkaround, or a sketch, or Pinterest board, think about your time too. I do think that the ‘what do you have?’ question means you as well. How much time, energy, passion do you have to devote? When Kristy Ramage asked me if I wanted to double the size of my kitchen garden, I felt positively faint. There are high maintenance spaces (which also need propagation spaces) and if you have more than a balcony or a small town garden and you want your entire space to be productive in that sense, then you had better give up work, holidays and any other hobbies that you might have been considering.
Sissinghurst, and my inspiration for the Nuttery
3. what does the garden want?
Genius loci. The spirit of the place. That indefinable quality that is something about the setting, the rural vs the urban, the climate, the history and the guardians from whom you inherited. Few of us are gardening in a space with such a heavy history as Sissinghurst, but I loved what Val Bourne wrote about working with, and working against, how a garden has already established itself.
‘Troy has pledged to let it drip with roses in June and July and then allow it to fade – though some roses will flower again but not as dramatically. He felt it had become a garden for every season and that had meant fewer roses and less of a spectacle in June and July, when it was supposed to peak. Vita collected old-fashioned roses and admired many that flowered only once. She planted two hundred different named roses, a hundred of which had been removed but are now being reinstated. Some were identified by old metal labels found in a pond. Once-only flowering roses are fabulous. The late Peter Beales loved these abundant roses much more than repeat-flowering ones. Vita apparently liked dusky roses such as ‘Charles de Mills’. Her vision was for ‘a tumble of roses and honeysuckle, figs and vines’ and she wanted to be ‘drunk on roses’ in June. I am thoroughly for this approach, of creating a spectacle that peaks and then fades, because I see lots of gardeners trying to make borders that offer something at every stage of the year. This is an impossibility because every plant has its day and the sight of a peony entering dormancy in August, displaying shabby foliage, jars against asters and late- flowering perennials.’
I rather object to the description of peony foliage as shabby – I rather like it - but I do recognise the dilemma of where to put my irises. A short but utterly glorious month of flowers and eleven of spear-like foliage. As beautiful as they are, I will not be putting them outside my new kitchen window.
If not, then what? As much as I have been talking about pleaching and topiary, these are the signs of a formal, moneyed garden. Malus Farm is, at heart, a cottage garden. The roof almost reaches the cobbles at the front. The genius loci of this place wears hobnail boots and tweed. She sleeps on patchwork quilts and picks plums. The topiary with therefore be a little misshapen (a considered design choice, not just my last of skill), bulging to one side and often covered in a little summer fuzz. The lime pleaching will be woven in tendrils, not marshalled into straight lines. The grass, despite my husband’s best efforts, will be long and full of buttercups.
And outside my kitchen window? Roses and delphiniums and soft, tumbling clematis.